This, very much this!

I do research in a subfield of optics called nonimaging optics (optics for energy transfer, e.g. solar concentrators or lighting systems). We typically use these optical design applications, and your observations are absolutely correct. Make some optical design software that uses GPUs for raytracing, reverse-mode autodiff for optimization, sprinkle in some other modern techniques you may blow these older tools out of the water.

I am hoping to be able to get some projects going in this direction (feel free to reach out if anyone are interested).

PS: I help organize an academic conference my subfield of optics. We run a design competition this year [1,2]. Would be super cool if someone submits a design that they made by drawing inspiration from modern computer graphics tools (maybe using Mitsuba 3, by one of the authors of this book?), instead of using our classical applications in the field.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42609892

[2] https://nonimaging-conference.org/competition-2025/upload/

This is one example of an area where economic incentives make it difficult to shift.

  - There aren't that many people willing to pay for such software, but those that do *really* need it, and will pay quite a bit (passing that cost on of course). 
 
  - The technical domain knowledge needed to do it properly is a barrier to many
 
  - It needs to be pretty robust

I think the main way this changes is when someone has already spend the money in an adjacent area, and realized "huh, with a little effort here we could probably eat X's lunch"

Beyond that you at most get toy systems from enthusiasts and grad students (same group?) ...

You’d be surprised! Everywhere I’ve worked, academic or industry, typically writes their own simulation software. Sometimes it’s entirely handwritten (i.e., end-to-end, preprocessing to simulation to evaluation), sometimes it’ll leverage a pre-existing open source package. I imagine this will become more and more common if, for no other reason, you can’t back-propagate an OpticStudio project and open source automatic differentiation packages are unbeatable.

I've been working on something similar, although I'm more interested in replicating the effects of existing lenses than designing new ones: https://x.com/dearlensform/status/1858229457430962318

PBRT 3rd edition actually has a great section on the topic but it's one of the parts that wasn't implemented for the GPU (by the authors, anyway): https://pbr-book.org/3ed-2018/Camera_Models/Realistic_Camera...

I once saw a youtube video of a guy who first modeled a pinhole camera in something like Blender3D and then went on to design and simulate an entire SLR camera.

I'd imagine there is fairly wide gap between having a simulation engine core and an useful engineering application

From academic side, I've found the work of Steinberg in this area extremely impressive. They are pushing the frontier to include more wave-optical phenomenon in the rendering. E.g. https://ssteinberg.xyz/2023/03/27/rtplt/

> eye-wateringly expensive

For you. Anyone doing design and manufacturing of optics will not blink at paying for software.

Well, everyone who can build this niche software is already employed to build it.

" I wonder how much work would be involved for someone to make optical design software that blows away the old tools"

Depending on use case, it already exists for gem cutters. We can simulate everything from RI to fluorescence excitation.

I predict PBR is going to fall to neural rendering. Diffusion models have been shown to learn all of the rules of optics and shaders, and they're instructable and generalizable. It's god mode for physics and is intuitive for laypersons to manipulate.

We're only at the leading edge of this, too.